Cinema Science

The cinema or movie theater is an excellent place to measure chemical emissions from human beings. In modern cinemas, cleaned and filtered outside air pumped into the cinema through gratings under the seats. It then sweeps over the audience and is then extracted from the room through the ceiling. As the air exits the building through ventilation shafts, we can measure the composition continuously using Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry. As the audience reacts to events on the screen, we can detect their chemical responses directly in the air. So each film has a characteristic pattern of chemical peaks. Interestingly we can also use the cinema data with the ticket sales to determine human emission rates, and even predict which age rating a movie should have based on audience chemical responses.

 

Publications

C. Stönner, A. Edtbauer, B. Derstroff, E. Bourtsoukidis, T. Klüpfel, J. Wicker, J. Williams. Can the age classification of films be made based on audience breath-chemical emissions? PLOS, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203044.

 C. Stönner, A. Edtbauer, J. Williams. Real world volatile organic compound emission rates from seated adults and children for use in indoor air studies. Indoor Air, DOI: 10.1111/ina.12405, 2017.

 J. Williams, C. Stönner, J. Wicker, N. Krauter, B. Derstroff, E. Bourtsoukidis, T. Klüpfel, S. Kramer. Cinema audiences reproducibly vary the chemical composition of air during films, by broadcasting scene specific emissions on breath. Nature Scientific Reports 6:25464,DOI: 10.1038/srep25464

Sheu, R., C. Stönner, J.C. Ditto, T. Klüpfel, J. Williams & D.R. Gentner: Human transport of thirdhand tobacco smoke: A prominent source of hazardous air pollutants into non-smoking enviroments. Sci. Adv., 6 (10), doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aay4109, 2020.